The traditional pressure in academia for faculty to "publish or perish" advances knowledge in established areas. But it also might discourage scientists from asking the innovative questions that are most likely to lead to the biggest breakthroughs, according to a new study spearheaded by a UCLA professor.

Why do unmarried women tend to be more liberal and Democratic than their married counterparts? A key reason is because unmarried women — those who have never been married and those who are divorced — are more concerned about the status of women as a collective group, suggests a new study that will be presented at the 110th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA).

The transmission of party identification from parent to child is one of the most important components of political socialization in the United States. Research shows that children learn their party identification from their parents, and parents drive the learning process. The vast majority of studies thus treats children as passive recipients of information and assumes that parent-child concordance equals transmission. Rather than relying on a single pathway by which parents teach children, we propose an alternative view by focusing on children as active agents in their socialization.

This paper proposes a theoretical framework and an empirical example of the relationship between the civic stratification of immigrants in the United States, and their access to healthcare. We use the 2007 Pew Hispanic Center/Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Hispanic Healthcare Survey, a nationally representative survey of U.S. Latinos (N = 2,783 foreign-born respondents) and find that immigrants who are not citizens or legal permanent residents are significantly more likely to be excluded from care in both the United States and across borders.

Context effects on survey response, caused by the unobserved interaction between beliefs stored in personal memory and triggers generated by the structure of the survey instrument, are a pervasive challenge to survey research. The authors argue that randomized survey experiments on representative samples, when paired with facilitative primes, can enable researchers to model selection into variable context effects, revealing heterogeneity at the population level.

A growing literature posits the importance of boundaries in structuring social systems. Yet sociologists have not adequately theorized one of the most fraught and consequential sites of boundary-making in contemporary life: the delineation of the official edges of the government—and, consequently, of state from society. This article addresses that gap by theorizing the mechanisms of state boundary formation. In so doing, we extend culturalist theories of the state by providing a more specific model of how the state-society boundary is produced.

While secrecy enables policy makers to escape public scrutiny, leaks of classified information reveal the social construction of reality by the state. I develop a theory that explains how leaks shape the discursive frames states create to communicate the causes of social problems to the public and corresponding solutions to redress them. Synthesizing cultural sociology, symbolic interactionism, and ethnomethodology, I argue that leaks enable non–state actors to amplify contradictions between the public and secret behavior of the state.